I, unapt in will, abide
and behold, winter has come upon me
and the endless storm has found me
naked and spoiled
with no perfecting of good.

I marvel at myself, beloved.
Daily I default and daily do repent.
I build up for an hour
and an hour overthrows what I have builded.
At evening I say
‘Tomorrow I shall repent’,
but when morning comes
joyous I waste the day.
Again at evening I say
‘I shall keep watch all night
and shall with tears entreat,’
but when night comes I sleep.

You must know that I am work,
there is no leisure in me.
The house you see is not unpacked,
we’re living out of boxes
haven’t books or blinds or curtains or
our mats upon the floor.

Work is my being,
and is next door.
When weariness brings me home
and the pain,
I look at you and find
in your yogic pose and innocence
refreshment in fear,
air for breathlessness,
space for a cramped old age.

They were cruel.
I can’t get them out of my sense —
the smell of wet beds
the stink of drains
stale washing
old work piling up never to be done
chafing pants leaking shoes
fire-less nights and half-cooked food.
There was no need for punishment,
each day was harsh enough.

You had a life of it
but we three had hell.

There’s the cause —
she’s lovely, you say,
and she was, in a violent way,
like an alien trying to be mother.

I don’t know how you were taken;
if it was a snapshot you were persuaded
to sit cross-legged,
and you must have been persuaded
to smile like that.

We have no such evidence of joy.
There were good times
that drudgery couldn’t suppress —
our poplars at autumn:
the leaves fell like scraps of celebration.

Sometimes it snowed
and that, like the leaves,
was a sign to me
of a new clean world
showing itself for hope.

Poplars divided the farm into squares.
Each square held its own:
raspberries, strawberries,
boysenberries, gooseberries,
coming in at different times.
Each square held its own surprise -
one might be quiet,
another picker-peopled;
one might have mushrooms in the verge
another a brood of quail.
The sun the wind the rain
made different spaces.
At harvest it was a game
with new moves each day,
and we three boys had company.
At other times we worked alone.

There were mountains
at the end of the road.
They had significance—
for us they were freedom
from fear and fret,
something established
that couldn’t be damaged.

I imagined them in storm.
There was no impediment,
no buildings in the way no trees
no elemental guilt.
There they could rage
flood freeze and drift as they pleased.
Wilderness attracted me,
its feral peace.

No winds blew in our fruit-filled
sun-drenched squares;
they were constrained,
tree-scented, and secured
from the house;
they cleansed our heads
from bed-room stench.
Our beds were never dry.
In those young years
none of us managed
to last through the night.
We were always loosed by worry,
flooding gushing worry,
too scared to get ourselves outside
past the possibility of ghosts,
and paralysed at the thought
that somewhere in the dark
might hide the cause.

There were a lot of ghosts at home.
You might have met some.
I remember when you came once
to stay for a week or two
and you looked frightened.
You spent a lot of time in the trees.
They came snapping at our heels
like a pack of dogs
to tear and scrap,
snarling at the remains.
They were wherever we went:
throughout the house
about the farm
at school at play at the shop —
a surprise in others eyes
a falling tone in speech and look
as if an end were near.
Sometimes it was unpaid bills
mentioned by a friend at school,
talked of at the barber’s,
questioned by the grocer,
argued at a knock at the door.
Next there would be a visit from the family
consequent quiet for a day or two,
then row upon row
of crockery and pots
tears and a splintered door
then bed for them
while we hid out in the farm.

They liked bed,
and made love with strength
as the apocalypse approached,
so eager for comfort
they forgot at times
to pull the blinds.

The worst were from the past.
We didn’t know their names
and they sometimes dodged into the future
from where they could paralyse.
The Present was enough –
it could come in a flash
like typhoid fro the drains
at the back of the shed,
of grey water and black slime.
We were sick of it together
and in the papers.
Nurses came and health inspectors
and a lavatory.

On the other side of home square
and down the whole length of the farm
ran the water race
on the north edge,
outside the trees,
a small ditch fast-flowing
with mountain water from the river
that curved out beyond the paddocks
where the sheep grazed.
We played there in brief secret times
when Dad was away
for reasons never given,
and Mother had so much to do
she did nothing.

Here we learned the elemental lore
of purity and how to kill it,
of water light and air
how they flowed.

There were eels in the race.
We caught cooked and ate one
though we knew that was a wasteful act,
and our motives suspiciously confused.

That water,
sun-lit between the trunks,
and the broad space beyond
of sheep and a wild river,
was an edge of happiness,
the possibility of limit
to the endless jobs always to be done
before and after school —
weeding pruning stacking packing,
putting this away and getting that,
works that began but had no end
and seemed designed entrapment.

They grew feeble in their concerns
in crisis and complexity,
and floundering.
They developed a theology of luck,
on which they based whole futures
and excuse for the past.

Because they had suffered,
reward was imminent.
For this they bought lotteries
and squandered the little they had.

They could have done well —
a handsome couple of good name,
of First Four Ships and past prestige,
but scandals from youth consumed them,
billowed and blew in a gathering storm,
and for disguise took philosophies
of that day —
‘excelsior’ ‘the glory of man’,
all dead as Empire,
affecting but despising life,
fascist but unable to fruit
and blind as a scoured-out road.

Their distracted state disabled them,
so we must grow their berries.
We were kept from school.
They didn’t think of it,
they were too self-absorbed.
All their wrongs were blamed
on outside sources,
nothing on within.
Their own small energy was spent
on strength for their need,
which was a vortex.
‘If only - - - -you would give,I would get it done.
If you would give mea lifta handa giftyour self - - - -
I would do it.’

They were a fog,
in which nothing could be seen
for itself.

They were the criteria
in which values were defined.
Nothing was good true pure.
Love joy sorrow
must be pretended to.

When your photo came to our house
it had to be hid
which I did.
It couldn’t be left around,
and would have been destroyed
for the judgement it made on our house.

a condemnation:you seated on the floorin the jersey your mother knitted,legs crossedhands on kneesyour hair in curls no barbercould make.
You must have been posed
by someone who knew to work space
on that floor
to make you a force
a destiny.

At three you had a currency
and the photo was sent about.
You wear convention now,
are sad and have no radiance,
yet you had a childhood —
in that state I was stateless,
and didn’t know my loss.
I still use you for comfort.
I sit in there with you,
and look out at the storm
that shakes my house,
wears at it and erodes
by grief and doubt and the acid guilt
of never having done
that tedious toil on the farm
and the grey contagion.

They toyed with death,
it was their way,
and I think the way of the times.

All their roads were blind, dead-end,
blocked by bad habit and lost trust,
contagious all
in air by touch in water food
routine converse and rite.

Can these necrotic knots be loosed?
By weight and test and taste-by-taste
or turn and re-invention?

In you I look to be reformed,
freed from the strategy of forgiveness
and others we used on the farm,
where each block was an island,
and life was possible between the bushes,
and diverting solutions.

Neither parent knew necessity,
could not recognise
nor catalogue priority.
Sufficiency came of its own
they thought,
directed and anonymous.
Health warmth solvency
were spontaneous;
a house was born with a roof.
Maintenance and forethought
were no true part of life,
nor provision needed for them.
A need a loss a poverty
were discords in justice
and would soon be put right
without effort.

We were set to work in case,
and it seemed reasonable.

The habits learned then haven’t died.
Even now I don’t light the fire
nor keep myself warm by other means
as I don’t know how.
My only skill is labour.

I eat only two meals a day,
am uncomfortable with cars,
uneasy on the telephone,
have no sense of occasion nor dress.
Ours was an unsocial existence,
pressed out of berryfruit.
I still shrink at the business of survival.

You lived in a sophisticated space,
arranged and liable to time.
We knew only light and night,
and seasons with dominant toil.

The sparseness they put around you
was a power;
to seat you on bare boards like that
cross-legged
was to make a Buddha.
Carpet must have been taken up
and things removed
to make a meaning.
He could have put a light behind,
hung a pomp above,
made a baldacchino,
placed a Chinese stand,
but your pose tells the power,
and your grin puts joy
into a personal space.

Mine is a rubbished mind,
of furniture unused
and abandoned rooms.
Some rotting article
is always in the way
and dust puffs in clouds
when I move.

This that I’m in
is my father’s chair.
It’s from my collected past.
He once had ambitions—
kept literary company,
took ‘Oriflamme’,
wrote poems of trees and chiefs
liked books,
and sometimes attended lectures.

Though ignorant
he wasn’t blissful
and was guilty at a fact,
as though it was damaged
by his incompetence.

His world became a carnivorous place
where nothing was safe
and disguise was mandatory.
He was afraid of sleep
lest the unknown come by,
and for that reason didn’t read,
yet there were the books,
all over the place,
against the walls
and under stairs,
which he had collected
as another man might cars,
for something to do
when it’s wet.

We had a choice of these
on stormy days,
and sometimes the gramophone.

Music and the written word
became for me the world,
and my necessary life a dream.

In books, people did normal things;
home was the fantasy,
thinning as it wore out
and the printed word showed through
in debt collectors angry friends
and police.

Our things were sold for food
and necessary bills.

It grew dark and dry
in the desert they made
from a sand of crumbs
and remnants.
There was no refreshment.

It became that they lived
as if they were visiting,
not as others did
but wandering
from one shadow to another,
out of home in each
and always on the wrong side
of the veil.

As the saint condemns the hedonist
by his own existence,
so they did to life,
making it unworthy
by their own example.
Death seemed to them a seductive fate
(like a prostitute’s glance from across the street)
an easy state,
that rest is best
and death a well-made bed,
this life a waste,
and that a proper end.

My life is out-of-date.
I’ve done most of those things
a man is to do
and learned to do them fittingly,
but I’ve not the graces you were given.
You were born in a temperate world,
and in spite of age
still move in it with confidence.
You’ve tamed the beast.
You expect a reasonable mean
as your parents did,
and like them know
to make it happen.

Mine died petty deaths
as if from ill thrift
or wilt before the wind.
He first,
in bed one afternoon.
She went soon,
from loneliness.
They left lively guilts behind.

No one of us looks back
and sees the same,
so I keep to work
and make it my script,
and for safety’s sake my eyes
and ears
all mine,
not theirs.

Work is my frame.
It holds together
all those things that make me,
which fall to other gravities
when a man hasn’t a centre.

And you are in a frame —
in that photo,
already all that could ever be.
Look at that elbow,
that angle,
it knows what to do
it holds in readiness for the moment
to jump from pose to act,
in fulcrum force and furious
if need be;
and the wrist —
it’s tensed for persuasion,
there’s no slack.

You were at the heart of being.
Nothing’s stationary in your frame.
Though only three
you’re a host of philosophies,
a child as proof of God.

It’s another force
that mass-produces
slaves and servitors like me.

I hope I am not stricken in my sleep,
that I am seduced by death
and know it before it comes.
Then I can go kindly,
but not before I’ve unpacked;
I would not want to go
and leave the house like me
skeletal, before its time.

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About the Editor

I've published five poetry collections: City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal’s Book (2002), To Terezín (2007), Celanie (2012), and A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014), as well as six books of fiction, most recently Kingdom of Alt (2010). I work as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3988-3926).